A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
More
alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" Headlines such as “A series of advances are finally beginning to make personalized medicine a reality” and “The age of personalized medicine is on the way” might be ours, but in fact these are from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Nevertheless, suggests the Times, personalized medicine is slower in coming than […]
German precision is bringing us “nanolaser medicine,” a way to diagnose and treat or destroy individual diseased cells. In the meantime, your everyday nanomedicine is getting pretty precise: A targeted nanodrug for prostate cancer has worked well in mice, and a metal-filled nanoparticle is under development to target, diagnose, and treat brain tumors. Despite all […]
The value of gold keeps going up in more ways than one. Most recently, it has been shown to have value in producing cleaner and greeneragricultural, pharmaceutical, and other chemicals. The game of paper-scissors-stone will need to be reinvented. A new form of papercould not be cut with a chainsaw. Solar film made […]
The cup of brain imaging may be half full or half empty. But it is certainly not getting any emptier: Functional MRI (fMRI) has advanced our understanding of the emotional and behavioral changes in women during the menstrual cycle, by mapping the brain’s activity; and a new scanner that can see nanoscale objects in materials […]
Automation is a crucial element of globalization, yet it is almost totally ignored by globalization analysts (including Tom Friedman in his book The Earth is Flat — an otherwise competent but corporatist analysis of globalization and its effects). Automation could halt the outsourcing of work to China and India but, unfortunately, it will do little […]
As one major genetics project ends, another pops up. The HapMap Project has been just about completed, with some positive results for medicine. The significance of the new project — the Cancer Genome Atlas (CGA) — is not just that it is likely to be the final offensive in the war on cancer, but also […]
Stents that open clogged arteries are amazing technology and have doubtless saved many lives, not to mention brought vascular surgeons, cardiac surgeons, and interventional cardiologists almost to fisticuffs. But today’s stents are not perfect, and there is much effort under way to improve them . . . and even to replace them with tissue-engineered vascular […]
You can already buy the products of spintronics research in memory devices. The tiny USB drive that carries gigabytes of data is an example. Now, spintronics is set to be applied to computing itself. Even before that breakthrough is applied, the exponential rise in the power of supercomputers continues. Close to half a petaflop is […]
When CNN produces the headline: “Medical advances not science fiction,” it just might be true. They include, of course, advances in the war on cancer, which is being won, and that’s not science fiction, either. Throughout this issue, such rumblings of revolution in healthcare are louder than ever. CNN Takes Notice Source article Discoveries of […]
The Advisory Board sees a revolution in spinal surgery, though not for another 15 years. The acceleration in the understanding of genetic and proteomic mechanisms of cells, perhaps more evident in this issue of Health Futures Digest than in any previous one, makes 15 years seem somewhat pessimistic. For sure, revolutions in other therapies will […]
